Are we facing an ‘Insect Apocalypse’ caused by ‘intensive, industrial’ farming and agricultural chemicals? The media say yes; Science says ‘no’

Jon Entine  June 16, 2020

The media call it the “Insect Apocalypse”. In the past three years, the phrase has become an accepted truth of the journalism literati, and usually associated with such apocalyptic terms as “ecosystem collapse” and “food crisis”. The culprit: modern agriculture, which is often linked to the Brave Not-So-New World of GMOs and gene-edited crops and the chemicals purportedly used to support it.

As recently as last month, an opinion writer for the New York Times, Margaret Renkl, warned of the dark ages about to be ushered in by pesticides. She makes a case for preserving “weedy” backyards filled with blood-sucking mosquitoes and other human-threatening flying and crawling creatures of various species.

The global insect die-off is so precipitous that, if the trend continues, there will be no insects left a hundred years from now. That’s a problem for more than the bugs themselves: Insects are responsible for pollinating roughly 75 percent of all flowering plants, including one-third of the human world’s food supply.  

Insect Armageddon, another popular phrase, is now one of the most common tropes in science journalism. As I’ve chronicled numerous times in recent years, (including here, here and here), many journalists have echoed claims by environmental activists  advancing a succession of insect- and animal-related environmental apocalypse scenarios over the last decade—first honeybees, then wild bees and more recently birds. In each case they fingered modern, intensive farming, particularly crop biotechnology and pesticides, as the culprit, and warned of the terrible consequences in store for the Earth, including the mass extinction of pollinators and the global famine that would surely follow. In each case, small or poorly executed studies predicting imminent catastrophes were ballyhooed by many in the media; in each case, as more research came to the light, the hyped claims were eventually retracted or dramatically readjusted.............To Read More....

Video: ‘Blood on their hands’—Greens’ resistance to biotechnology blocks sustainable agriculture, climate change innovation, says GLP’s Jon Entine

Jon Entine, Marcel Bruins | October 30, 2019

Green advocacy groups, mostly based in Europe, are the single biggest impediment to sustainable agriculture, said GLP executive director Jon Entine in an interview with Marcel Bruins, editorial director of European Seed magazine and website.

CRISPR and other gene-editing and New Breeding Techniques are fast being adopted around the world, although many ‘environmental activist’ groups are doing their best to frighten the public and intimidate legislators into erecting insurmountable regulatory barriers. They’ve been largely successful in Europe, which is blocking gene-edited crops under legislation passed in the pre-CRISPR era in 2001, Entine said, but the rest of the world is more open to the innovations.

Entine was interviewed in mid-October at the annual Euroseeds Congress 2019, held in Stockholm............To Read More.........

‘Children killer’ glyphosate found in Cheerios? Experts dismantle Environmental Working Group’s herbicide food residue study

Cameron English, Jon Entine | June 17, 2019

Last week, on June 12 2019, the organic industry-funded Environmental Working Group (EWG) issued a news release that claimed, “Major food companies like General Mills continue to sell popular children’s breakfast cereals and other foods contaminated with troubling levels of glyphosate, the cancer-causing ingredient in the herbicide Roundup.”

EWG’s announcement is the third of its kind focusing on the alleged dangers of glyphosate residues in our food. It was immediately trumpeted by fringe activist groups—that’s par for the course—but was also covered, almost entirely uncritically, by mainstream sources, such as CNN:

What’s the news here?

Like its predecessors, released in July and October 2018, this EWG ‘study’ was based on a “round of tests” that was not peer reviewed by independent experts. Its scientists claimed that they found dozens of instances in which food it tested did not pass its “children’s health benchmark” for assessing potential exposure level hazards.

EWG did not mention that its ‘benchmark’ is entirely made up, has no clear scientific basis and is at odds with historically established and globally recognized benchmarks used by regulators in every country. The EWG “safety threshold” is 100 times lower than even the most conservative cut-off established by oversight agencies around the world, including the EPA. Curiously but not surprisingly considering EWG’s historical willingness to distort science, the threshold it settled upon just ‘happens’ to coincide with the infinitesimally trace amounts of glyphosate it found on Cheerios. ............To Read More....

How NPR, Washington Post, Bloomberg and other media botched reporting on EPA’s ‘ban’ of 12 ‘bee-killing’ neonicotinoid insecticides

Cameron English, Jon Entine | June 5, 2019 @ Genetic Literacy Project

Image: Larissa Walker/Center for Food Safety

If recent headlines are the measure, advocacy groups making a case that bees are endangered because of the misuse of pesticides just scored a significant victory. On May 20, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that after a 6-year-long legal battle with anti-pesticide activists, it endorsed a voluntary withdrawal of 12 insecticides by a group of agri-chemical companies that a coalition of environmental groups had blamed for health problems in bees.

George Kimbrell, Center for Food Safety legal director and lead counsel in the case against the EPA, immediately claimed that that the settlement represented a massive victory in support of his claims that neonics from ‘harmful’ and ‘toxic’ chemicals. According to a post on the CFS site:

[The] cancellation of these …. pesticides is a hard-won battle and landmark step in the right direction,’ said …. Kimbrell …. ‘But the war on toxics continues: We will continue to fight vigilantly to protect our planet, bees, and the environment from these and similar dangerous toxins.

Facts aside—we will address that—Kimbrell’s casting of the court agreement as a victory for anti-pesticide campaigners was the narrative angle adopted by much of the media. According to reports that flooded the Internet, from the Washington Post to fringe activist sites, the EPA ‘banned’ 12 ‘dangerous’ neonicotinoids, a class of insecticides that environmental activists blame for bee health issues.

Unsurprisingly, CFS acolytes like Care2 crowed in its headline and blog about the success in bringing American regulators to heel. VICTORY! EPA Cancels 12 Bee-Killing Pesticides, Care2 wrote on its activist social community site:

The environmentalists, food safety organizations and beekeepers spent the last 6 years holding the EPA accountable for its lack of diligence in preventing or addressing bee Colony Collapse Disorder and to demand that the EPA protect livelihoods, rural economies and the environment.

Most mainstream media outlets parroted the CFS line. Business Insider’s Aria Bendix told readers, The US just banned 12 pesticides that are like nicotine for bees. Bloomberg reported, EPA Curbs Use of 12 Bee-Harming Pesticides. According to Washington Post energy reporter Dino Grandoni,”EPA now blocks a dozen products containing pesticides thought harmful to bees. The respected publication The Scientist headlined its article, EPA Cancels Registrations for 12 Neonicotinoid Pesticides, noting in the first line:

Out of concern for bees, the Environmental Protection Agency announced on May 20 that the registrations for 12 neonicotinoid-based products used as pesticides in agriculture would be canceled…

But not one of those articles, or dozens of others in news sites across the world, accurately represented what the EPA actually said or the actions that it took.

What did the EPA say and do............To Read More, Much More!!!!!

Latest ecological fake news scare: Like the ‘honeybee armageddon’ narrative, pesticide-driven ‘insect-pocalypse’ claim is collapsing

Jon Entine | Genetic Literacy Project | March 21, 2019



Credit Image: The New York Times

It was only a few years ago that headlines in Europe and North America were screaming about the coming “bee armageddon”. Honeybees were going extinct, we were told, and because these vital pollinators are vital to our food supply, we were on the verge of global starvation. And pesticides were mostly to blame for the crisis.

The problem with that thesis was that honeybee populations aren’t declining, let alone headed for extinction. As I’ll explain below, the media have finally updated their doomsday reporting (years behind the Genetic Literacy Project, which has been documenting the faux crisis for years).

 However, no sooner does one apocalypse slip from the headlines than another springs up to take its place. Recently, news and advocacy groups sites have been afire with dire warnings that man’s days on earth are (once again) numbered, this time due to the accelerating extinction of all of the world’s insects.

More on the impending insect crisis below.  later. But let’s first review the botched narrative also known as the “bee-pocalypse.” Yes, bees do face some health challenges as the result of a variety of factors, most prominently their loss of habitat and the explosive growth of their mortal enemy, the Varroa mite. But balanced analysis by independent scientists put the use of pesticides way down on the list of pollinator threats. Even some advocacy groups finally abandoned the crisis rhetoric.
“Save the bees’ is a rallying cry we’ve been hearing for years now,” wrote the Sierra Club in a stunning reversal in 2018, abandoning its long held position, parroted by the press, that honeybee doomsday was upon us. “Honeybees are at no risk of dying off.”

While diseases, parasites and other threats are real problems for beekeepers, the total number of managed honeybees worldwide has risen 45% over the last half century.............To Read More...

Viewpoint: As global honeybee population increases, activists blame neonicotinoid pesticides for ‘bird-pocalypse’ that’s not happening

Jon Entine | @ Genetic Literacy Project | November 13, 2018

Are we in the midst of another bout of unfounded environmentalist-fueled exaggerations—this time about birds becoming extinct because of pesticide exposure?

We’ve seen this script most recently, with hyped fears about the demise of the honeybee. Anti-pesticide activists abetted by some mostly inexperienced bee keeper newbies, claimed that honeybee populations in Europe and North America were collapsing as a result of a mysterious condition that came to be known as ‘colony collapse disorder’. CCD, mostly concentrated in California in 2006-07, was marked by a unique condition in which worker honeybees suddenly abandoned otherwise healthy-seeming hives for no apparent reason. It remains a genuine mystery, although research has turned up similar collapses that have occurred periodically and inexplicably in Europe over the past few centuries.

CCD was followed by a series of severe winters that led to higher-than-usual overwinter bee deaths, fueling genuine concerns among scientists about bee health. The issue soon migrated into the mainstream media when anti-GMO and anti-chemical groups aligned to blame pesticides for both CCD and the overwinter losses, and by-and-large refused to recognize the complexity of bee life and bee health.

Politicization of the ‘bee crisis’

Most of the finger-pointing was initially directed at a class of pesticides developed in the 1990s—neonicotinoids—that were designed specifically to replace organophosphates, pyrethrins and pyrethroid insecticides, which are highly toxic to mammals and beneficial insects, including bees. From this sprang an entire cottage industry of (mostly laboratory) studies by some activist-oriented scientists that appeared to be designed more to prove a case than explore a mystery.

The politicization of what should have been a science-based issue culminated in the European Union’s decision earlier this year to expand its 2013 partial ban on these insecticides to cover all outdoor uses—which has led to the reintroduction of the more toxic chemicals phased out in the 1990s.

It’s now widely accepted that honeybee populations aren’t collapsing after all, with populations steady or rising in Europe and North America for the last 20 years—and rising worldwide for more than a half-century, as even the Sierra Club now grudgingly acknowledges.

…honeybees are at no risk of dying off. While disease, parasites, and other threats are certainly real problems for beekeepers, the total number of managed honeybees worldwide has risen by 45 percent over the last half century 

What threatens bee health?

We now have a pretty good idea of what drove the higher-than-normal health problems that existed after the CCD scare : the Varroa destructor mite infestations of hives combined with widespread prevalence of a honeybee gut fungus called nosema ceranae. It should be noted the experts agree that rising global honeybee colony numbers do not mean that bees are not struggling; in fact there is general agreement that bee health is a serious issue, but pesticides are a comparatively minor threat compared to the host of diseases and the overuse of miticides to fight some of the challenges. In Australia where neonics are widely used, and Varroa and nosema are health, bee health is not an issue.

Bees are seen by farmers and professional beekeepers as, essentially, livestock but in the wake of the extinction scares, bees have taken on almost a romantic, mythical status among the public and hobby bee keepers. That goes a long way to explaining why no activist campaign has been launched to eradicate Varroa and the nosema fungus. First, they are both extremely difficult to combat. The mites, in particular, have rapidly developed resistance to every synthetic chemical mite treatment yet devised. What’s more, poor mite-control practices by amateur beekeepers who refuse to treat their mite problems with effective chemicals has had the effect of turning their collapsing hives into escalating sources of contagious infestation for neighboring beekeepers’ hives.

But more to the point, focusing attention on a combination of complex factors doesn’t have the pizazz of finding any easy bogeyman like pesticides. The anti-chemical hysteria also has helped fill an expanding piggybank for advocacy groups for years now. Consider the Sierra Club again. Even as it was proclaiming an end to its own bee-pocalypse hysteria, it launched a fund-raising campaign designed to raise money by scaring the public with dire warnings that pesticides were on the verge of wiping out bees. This Sierra Club fund raising flyer arrived at my house.

Now ‘threatened’ birds provide a new scare opportunity

In April, a pair of studies from France—one regionally focused, one nationwide—claimed widespread declines in European populations of field birds. The studies, which were not yet released, reportedly attributed these declines to modern agricultural practices, specifically, the widespread use of the same neonicotinoid pesticides blamed for the non-existent ‘bee-pocalypse’.

Articles about these studies appeared widely last spring, including in the New York Times, and the spate of stories persisted for weeks. The studies, however, remain unpublished today—suggesting a novel form of advocacy for activist environmental scientists: leak or brief your sensational results to the press to generate media attention while keeping a controversial study, and the data on which the advertised findings depend, under wraps. The peer-reviewed data that led to headlines around the world might in fact never be released.

Understandably, the stories fueled a new anxiety over neonic pesticides: They threaten bird population along with the bees.

In late summer, another study from the team of Saskatchewan-based scientist Christy Morrissey, known for her anti-neonic views, sought to demonstrate that birds (in this case tree swallows) that catch their insect prey in flight were being adversely affected by a dearth of aquatic insects. Those insects, it was assumed, were being decimated by the run off of neonicotinoid pesticides from farm lands into freshwater rivers, streams, lakes and ponds.

As it happens, the study didn’t confirm this hypothesis; it actually demonstrated much the opposite: It found that tree swallows were enjoying even richer diets of aquatic insects. So, whatever was happening in all those streams and ponds, neonics weren’t affecting the abundance of aquatic insect meals for insectivorous birds.

Morrissey’s team did, however, find something else in their data that they characterized as a neonic-caused calamity: Tree swallows foraging in cropland exhibited lower body weight than those foraging in grasslands. Morrissey speculated that these birds were ‘struggling’ as neonic-treated croplands left them with a scantier insect diet. This she wrote, is what has led to a fall-off in the birds’ overall numbers.

What is the status of bird health in North America?

But there are questions as to this purely speculative conclusion. We know what the main killers of birds are, and they aren’t pesticides:

• By far, scientists say, the greatest challenge to bird populations is habitat loss—which is mostly attributed to ‘urban sprawl’— the conversion of rural acreage, whether farm or forest, to (sub)urbanization. The parallel here to Varroa and bees is unmistakable: We know the main problem but since it’s complicated and doesn’t lend itself to a facile solution, let’s not acknowledge or analyze it.
• Other man-made environmental challenges, such as windmills and high-voltage electric lines crisscrossing the rural landscape, kill up to a billion or more birds annually. The US Fish & Wildlife Service estimates that collisions with high-voltage electric lines alone kill 174 million birds per year. In-flight collisions with skyscrapers and other buildings kill between 97 million and 976 million birds per year in the US. Collisions with cars account for another roughly 60 million bird fatalities. The list goes on.
• Cats have been estimated to kill an astounding 1.3 billion and 3.7 billion birds per year.  

As for the threat from neonicotinoid-treated seeds, they have been shown to have low toxicity to birds. Vertebrate nervous systems are much less susceptible to nicotine and synthetic compounds that mimic the disruptive effects on the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors essential to the functioning of insect nervous systems. Moreover, birds generally avoid the tiny fraction (1% is deemed permissible under EPA rules) of neonic-treated seeds that may remain on the ground after mechanical planting, due perhaps to their altered appearance (many are colored), smell or taste.  

The most common of these treated seeds, corn, is, in any case, too large for small and medium-sized birds to ingest and too hard for them to crack with their beaks. All of which may help explain why such research as we have seen trying to link the supposed ‘devastation’ of bird populations to pesticides hasn’t focused on the effects of direct ingestion by birds; instead, as with Christy Morrissey’s team’s most recent study, the effort appears designed to demonstrate some indirect effect on bird populations from indiscriminate adverse impacts on the birds’ insect food sources.  
How badly are birds actually fairing? Is the bird-pocalypse any more reality-based than the bee version? Ultimately, all of these claims about the supposed imminent extinction of some species or other—honeybees a few years ago; field birds today—depend on a lack of context driven, it appears, by ideology.  

There is, in fact, a good deal of evidence that birds in general are in pretty good shape in the US. Numerous studies have documented a gradual decline of bird populations in the US and the developed world, but as in the case of bee population fall-off, these declines occurred in the

decades before the large-scale introduction of neonicotinoid pesticides in the late 1990s. As the Genetic Literacy Project reported some years ago, many bird populations seem to have leveled off during the last two decades and have in many cases increased since the 1990s. Bird populations don’t appear to have been impacted since their introduction.

What about other pesticides? Bird deaths directly attributable to pesticides—all pesticides, not just neonics—have been estimated to total 76 million annually. (An unknown additional number die from other indirect effects.) That’s about three-quarters of 1% of the day-to-day bird population in the US or three-eighths of 1% of the peak autumn bird population. Clearly, they are not a major driver of bird population trends, as so many other factors, including ‘natural causes’, result in far more bird fatalities annually.

Stampeding policy-makers on the basis of mischaracterized, misdiagnosed, half-understood supposed problems into adopting measures that won’t, in any case, solve them is a prescription for dreadful decisions.

Jon Entine, executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, has been a journalist for more than 40 years as a writer, network television news producer and author of seven books, four on genetics and risk. BIO. Follow him on Twitter @JonEntine